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Storing game high scores for legacy games on TNFS servers.


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  • 2 weeks later...

I played a bit Jawbreaker II and could enter highscore. There were already some other entries after I have booted the game.

After playing and entering the highscore, it seems that the highscores all reset to 00000.

Because when I played the second time I could enter my name again, but was suddenly alone at first position in the highscore list.

I guess this game needs some fixing. I mounted the game of course readonly from apps.irata.online

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15 minutes ago, Tron04 said:

I played a bit Jawbreaker II and could enter highscore. There were already some other entries after I have booted the game.

After playing and entering the highscore, it seems that the highscores all reset to 00000.

Because when I played the second time I could enter my name again, but was suddenly alone at first position in the highscore list.

I guess this game needs some fixing. I mounted the game of course readonly from apps.irata.online

Do you have the latest firmware for Fujinet because earlier versions do not support high-score saving?

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Would it be possible to hack some of these high score enabled games to make it so difficulty cannot be changed?  To truly level the playing field.

 

For example, Pac-Man lets you adjust starting difficulty.  The problem is that most people will play this game with normal difficulty (start game on the Cherry level where the Cherry is worth 100 points).

 

But you can adjust the starting level all the way up to Key which is worth 5000 points per Key eaten.

 

This completely unbalances the game as really the only way to efficiently compete on the public high score table is to know that you should start with Key level difficulty.

 

Or if there was a way to note which difficulty level the player started with in the high score table.

 

I am using Pac-Man as an example, but there might be others as well.  Pac-Man competition would be much more interesting if the scores were wiped and everyone was forced to start on the same Cherry level.

 

 

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Just read this thread for the first time.

One of the issues is typically that the h/s table is only read / setup when the game is loaded.

I would suggest that an approach to patching any game would be to identify at which point the game begins scanning to see where your score will fall.

A hook should be inserted to then reload the h/s table from the ATR, hence this triggering the loading of any scores uploaded in the meantime.

Upon return your score is compared against the latest and so if you were successful this will be entered (or you asked to enter name/initials etc).

Then the write back to the ATR can occur and the master h/s table made available for other players.

This still leaves a window where another player (P2) completes a game around the same time as you (P1) but takes longer to enter their initials.

In this case P1 & P2 both have loaded HSa. P1 got top spot and enters their initials and saves as HSb. P2 completes their initials and saves, HSc, but P2's HSc doesn't contain P1's score and so that has been lost.

 

Personally I'd prefer to see the atarionline.pl Hi-Score Café utilised and instead oatch titles to post scores directly there.

This is fine with 8K,16K, 32K titles where there is plenty of free RAM to add the necessary code and patch in the hook to it.

But granted that for larger games this becomes a bit harder as that space might be harder to come by.

However that doesn't exclude employing an overlay and loading that in to do the job and then restoring the game code.

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I appreciate your insights.

 

I did the High Score Enabled feature as a way to bring existing games into the fold for playing existing arcade games together.

 

As such, Making changes to existing games does mean that some shortcuts had to be made, one of them was understanding that there were a number of race conditions that can occur. 

 

This particular method is a complement to atarionline.pl's method that does not require an external server, and can be deployed quickly at local parties.

 

If you want to take a crack at improving on what I've done, go ahead, the code is available for virtually every part of it. :)

https://github.com/FujiNetWIFI/fujinet-high-scores

 

-Thom

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8 hours ago, Wrathchild said:

Personally I'd prefer to see the atarionline.pl Hi-Score Café utilised and instead oatch titles to post scores directly there.

This certainly is the more sophisticated solution but also magnitudes more complex to implement into existing programs.

For Thom's solution you only need to add code which reads and writes one or more sectors on disk. The remaining stuff is handled by Fujinet and the backend.

 

Also, due to the huge ;) amount of people playing these games, the risk that two of them are high-scoring at the same time is probably quite close to NIL.

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  • 2 weeks later...
4 hours ago, DjayBee said:

@tschak909 a very nice Roc'N'Rope clone:

 

178 Tales of Dragons and Cavemen (92 90 8D 89 89 means 97400 -> byte-$89=digit)

 

and

720 Time Bandit

 

Tales of Dragons & Cavemen (1986)(AMC-Verlag)(DE)(FW)[req 64K][cr CSS].atr 90.02 kB · 0 downloads Time Bandit (1984)(Atari)(DE)[cr CSS].atr 90.02 kB · 0 downloads

ooo! awesome, will put these up! :)

 

-Thom

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  • 3 weeks later...

200-204 Herbert

start game, do nothing and die to see the score table

boot side B

side A with [m] contains a modified HS table

 

550-551 and perhaps 368 Ace of Aces

start a mission and push the plane to the ground a.k.a. die and then push the trigger, to see the score table

Both images have a lot of differences, so do not compare them. But they share the main code and the HS table.

The US Gold release contains a modified HS table and a modified sector 368 of which I don't know if it is HS-related or a plain dumping error.

 

If a good player of Ace of Aces reads this: Score high on the attached Accolade image and post the modified image - thanks.
 

Herbert (1988)(AMC-Verlag)(PAL)(DE)(FW)(Side A).atr Herbert (1988)(AMC-Verlag)(PAL)(DE)(FW)(Side A)[m].atr Herbert (1988)(AMC-Verlag)(PAL)(DE)(FW)(Side B)[!][cr CSS].atr Ace of Aces (1987)(Accolade)(US)[!][req 64K][cr CSS].atr Ace of Aces (1987)(US Gold)(GB)[req 64K][m].atr

Edited by DjayBee
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  • 7 months later...

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